Vocero Newspaper Visits Naguake Yabucoa Periódico El Vocero Visita Naguake Yabucoa (2009)On February 23, 2009 the Vocero Newspaper visited Naguake Community Center to learn more about our school-community project, particularly the Schools in Naguake Program. During their visit they met students of the Cultural-Linguistic Immersion Program from Yabucoa and Maunabo; who were practicing the Taino batu (ball) game and Taino areitos (dances). The students visit the Center to learn about their indigenous heritage in a natural and cultural setting. Here students experience their Taino indigenous culture, learn cultural values, and traditions in a very tangible and consistent manner.

This dissertation examines the historical, institutional, and interactional dimensions of Taíno activism in Puerto Rico. Particularly, I consider how the presumedextinction of the Taíno in Puerto Rico has served to limit their claims to indigeneity aswell as the role that they can play in public policy debates concerning the management of indigenous human remains and sacred sites. Drawing on two years of ethnographicresearch in Puerto Rico, I argue that Taíno activists address and reconfigure widespreadhistorical narratives within everyday interactions. I propose that Taíno activists seek toreposition the histories that erase them by focusing particularly on three factors: (1) theincongruity between the life stories and documents that inform prevalent historicalnarratives premised on the Taíno extinction and the personal and filial trajectories thatinform current claims to being Taíno, (2) the ensuing discrepant interpretations of ambiguous terms in historical documents, and (3) the repair of Taíno erasure through theactive reclamation of Taíno identity in cultural and linguistic terms. I examine how theseincongruities, ambiguities and repairs materialize at various levels of social action: withindiscursive and interactional realignments, through recruitment encounters, in thesocialization of novices, in the course of creating a Taíno script, throughout themanufacture of Taíno speech forms, and in bureaucratic encounters. The dissertationshows how these social dimensions have been involved in the recent public emergence of Taíno as an increasingly visible social identification in Puerto Rico.

Note: Dr. Feliciano-Santos conducted part of her field reserach in our community between 2006-2008, and she dedicates a chapter of her PhD Dissertation to our Cultural-Linguistic Immersion Program.